A simple distraction-free, no gimmick writing tool | Hacker News Reader

A simple distraction-free, no gimmick writing tool

skadimoolam.github.io

39 pointsskadimoolam45 comments

I've tried perhaps a dozen of these writing tools, as I'm looking for one for my Android tablet. I've yet to find one where I can write more than a page worth of stuff without being forced to crane my neck to stare at the very bottom of the tablet for the entire rest of the time I'm writing.

Sublime allows me to scroll past the end, and I didn't realize just how important that feature is until I had to trudge through the endless morass of apps that don't. Predictably, this app doesn't either. I wonder how much actual writing these writing app devs actually do.

I'm not asking for an option for the cursor to stay in the middle or two thirds of the way down the screen, though that would be really really really nice. But scroll-past-end is essential.

Will surely look into this feature.

Answering your question of "I wonder how much actual writing these writing app devs actually do?". I am not sure about other developers but I love to write and I write about 1000 words everyday. From my point of view this is the tool I would love to have found earlier. This was the need for me to build this tool in the first place.

I really appreciate you sharing your opinion will surely look into what's possible.

Thanks

There's money in this space. I've spent maybe $30 just looking for the right app, only to come up empty.

Sure, I agree with you, I too have spend a few dollars here and there trying to find the perfect writing utility.

.my-3 { padding-bottom: 75vh; }

does the trick.

VIM [1], Emacs [2], intellij based ides over ideavim's set scrolloff 999 command like in vim [3], Atom [4], ...

[1] http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Keep_your_cursor_centered_vertical...

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/edt/Scro...

[3] https://github.com/JetBrains/ideavim/blob/master/doc/set-com...

[4] https://atom.io/packages/scrolloff

Parent is interested in running on an Android tablet, so emacs or vim running in termux would probably work well for him.

https://termux.com/

> I wonder how much actual writing these writing app devs actually do.

Writing app dev here. Not nearly enough is the answer.

Building a writing app is probably the greatest mistake I ever made as a writer, because I spend 75% of my free time fixing bugs, following up with users and building features and the other 25% writing.

I say it's my worst mistake as a writer. But as a coder it's been a very rewarding experience and helped me land my current job

The perfect combination for me for a writing tool would be a combination of notepad++ and evernote. I've tried tons of tools, but none of them are completely satisfactory.

Np++:

Pro: extremely flexible editing, moving lines around, structuring thougths with tabs and keeping the indentation level when pressing enter.

Con: Having tons of tabs of notes like "new23", "new25" makes it difficult to keep track of stuff.

Evernote:

Pro: convenient naming of snippets, tags, auto saving everything, cloud sync between devices (optional: embeddig images, or files).

Con: horrible editing experience (compared to np++ which I'm accustomed to)

Does this bring anything that is not part of https://standardnotes.org?

I'm in no way affiliated with this project but that's what I use to write and I absolutely love it, but I'm always open to trying other tools should it make sense.

Thanks for sharing this tool.

Nice tool. I would add a dark theme to it, people love a dark theme. I'm the developer of Poe, a distraction free writing app for windows, and a dark theme is the default. I regularly get email from users telling me how much they adore the colour scheme.

It's good to have options. I personally cannot stand dark color schemes, my eyes cannot handle it somehow, it's very difficult for me to read light on dark for more than a couple of seconds.

And a lot of people are exactly the opposite and can't stand black text on white background. Options are good. of course the challenge is knowing where to draw the line between having lots of features and being a simple app.

Certainly the UI is unobtrusive - which is a good thing. But what seems missing is how to go back to view files that were saved...unless I'm missing something. Also, aren't there other tools for distraction-free writing, such as Windows' notepad, or the open source nano (on *nix), or something along those lines? Again, kudos for the base UI, but i think it might need a tad little more as far as next steps (e.g. retrieving already saved text files, etc.).

It's great to hear your opinion. I built this tool for my own purpose. I wanted to practice writing long essays that's all this tool does. But I will surely look into permanent saving options and sharing of these notes.

Cool, it doesn't persist after you close the browser, which is fine. Anyone can copy/paste.

But one killer feature would be to sync it with Google Docs. Or make it a feature of Drive.

Thanks for the suggestion, will look into saving the content on Google Drive or other storage options.

I like the UI.

Couple of ideas to think about:

* remove save/restore and save on every keystroke

* create new URL for each new document, restore when visited

* save content in localStorage only, if it's not meant for sharing

Thank you for the ideas, will look into what's possible.

LocalStorage is a very small space(can't recall the numbers right now) I've come to learn. And it varies between browsers.

Plain text is small, and the smallest limit appears to be on the order of 2MB, which is enough to fit several NaNoWriMo novels. (And that's if you're storing them uncompressed.)

(source: https://stackoverflow.com/q/2989284/1223693, https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/offline/quota-resear...)

Here is another one that I've been using for years https://draftin.com/

This ones great, thanks for sharing.

What are the privacy policies of websites like these? I use a word counter website when writing responses that are supposed to be a certain length and have wondered about the business model. I only ever paste in text that isn’t confidential since I don’t really know.

I see this site has a word counter, so if it has a good privacy policy I’d be inclined to use it instead!

I am sorry for not explaining the site's privacy policy.

I can assure that I collect no data about any user, there are no cookies what so ever. About the word counter, it uses 10 lines of JavaScript to look for the number of spaces in your text and that's all the logic that power this tool. When you save the content, it never leaves your browser.

Hope this clears you doubt.

Great — you've become my new word counter website! I'll give it a try for drafting also.

Why dont you simply use notepad++ and count the spaces?

It's not that easy. Line breaks, huphens, double spaces, punctuation etc all make it tricky

I'm somewhat amazed by the amount of votes writing apps like this get here on HN. That is the second time I see such an "app" on the front page.

It's a nice little project, don't get me wrong.. I just don't see the use case to be honest.

I do not get what is purpose of this? Write and what? Is the purpose to share? Or the purpose primarily is to “capture” the thought? If it is the latter, I think getting on web and accessing a URL is a good path to distraction.

I built this tool for my own purpose. I wanted to practice writing long essays that's all this tool does. But I will surely look into permanent saving options and sharing of these notes.

I have been using Left https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/left

This is cool, I appreciate the minimal aesthetic. Having the ability to persist and retrieve would be a value-add for me.

Thanks for your feedback, will look into saving to Google Drive or other storage options.

i am not sure what it is supposed to do. is it just a textbox or does it do something i'm not seeing?

In my opinion one of the best writing tool / distraction free is http://telegra.ph/

It looks like your tool but the text formatting is Medium-like and you can share it really easily and anonymously by clicking on publish.

This was what I had in mind when building the tool. Thanks for sharing this link.

Reminds me of https://svbtle.com too.

A similar tool, but even simpler: https://txt.fyi/

How about using a text editor?

Sublime Text in Distraction free mode is the best, but I wanted something online.

ssh into a VM and use vim? ;-)

Hmm. The other 120 open browser tabs aren't a distraction?

Good point, but I not a 120 tabs person.

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